Topic on Talk:User Interaction Consultation/Request information

One related idea explored some time ago was to surface more the concept of references to readers. We repeatedly hear questions about Wikipedia's reliability. In many cases readers are not aware of they can check, request, and provide references.

By surfacing this system readers may be able to identify content as reliable and help editors by highlighting where that is not the case or suggesting external links to support some of the claims in an article.

yes! this is an interesting way for readers to contribute. I believe that @Astinson (WMF) is working on better education around references and it would be interesting to see what simple feedback or citation tools a reader can be equipped with to provide value.

Hey @Pginer-WMF some initial connections of what else is going on:

• First, references are one of the few Wikipedia contributions that can be easily gamified and doesn't actually require all that much expertise in many cases (we are having a fair bit of success with https://tools.wmflabs.org/citationhunt/ and you can check the usage out https://tools.wmflabs.org/citationhunt/en/stats.html?days=90). It actually has quite a lot of appeal for librarians and alot of other folks, who think of themselves as experts because its a way of checking true/false on information already in Wikipedia, rather than creating anew -- all and all information validation with a source is quite a low hanging fruit activity. However, this doesn't hold through for every Wikipedia: German Wikipedia hardly uses footnotes, and has no concept of "citation needed" (where the vast majority of other languages do). We successfully used this to start a campaign: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/The_Wikipedia_Library/1Lib1Ref , which appears to do a lot of good: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/The_Wikipedia_Library/1Lib1Ref/Lessons. Bringing such functionality deeper into the interface (using some type of commenting software, or a hack sitting on top of VE, perhaps?), would be a great low-level engagement strategy, and could conceivably be a manageable backlog if you arrange the workflows correctly.
• We did an education experiment through the reference sections, via the proposal at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Research_help/Proposal, using the informational page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Research_help) and we are evaluating the data at the moment. Its a little delayed: the evaluation got caught in a series of delays, my changing role, the Winter's chaos and conference season. All in all: the community was a little resistant because of our process for implementing the page and not having substantial enough information, but we hit a substantial number of readers, including a large number of students and people associated with Education. The readers found the page informative, and a number of folks said they would recommend it to students or teachers. The community resistance means we don't have it linked on many pages at the moment, but we're still getting 60-80 page views a day.
• With @Dario (WMF) 's Wikicite 2016 coming up (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiCite_2016), there is a lot of opportunity in the near term to make the references ecosystem really dynamic, reusable, and stored in a structured and engageble way. This is in part, because of how Zotero and Citoid (@Mvolz (WMF) cc'ed), make the population of structured data simple, and once the citation data is already in Wikidata, we could plan on drawing from a database of existing citations that have been hand-cleaned.

But in general, super excited with someone thinking about scoping such an activity: both @Ocaasi (WMF) and I are very interested in how to improve the reference ecosystem, and would love to work with you more on how to make this really accessable for programs, campaigns, and other kinds of organizing activities.

Let me know how I can help, and what you have questions about.

Thanks @Astinson (WMF) for providing detailed info on these initiatives. I'm happy to hear that there is good thought and work in this area.

I talked with @Jkatz (WMF) the other day, and wanted to make sure that an idea from that conversation, got captured here. A big part of the problem with the way that the Article feedback tool collected data, was that there was no good ways to prioritize and decided if feedback was in fact acitonable or usable. A system could provide canned feedback that validates the need for that information from multiple user interactions, and could be focused on pushing content in the backlogs for some of the inline templates (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Inline_Templates ) or even the section templates ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Template_messages/Section). There are good precedents for these kinds of workflows coming out of Zooniverse and a couple other projects -- where queries/concerns/questions from the crowd get double, triple, or etc checked, and then only labeled "real" at a certain level of confidence from the crowd.

@Pginer-WMF Also, it might be worth taking a look at #AskWikipedia conversation started by liam at https://www.facebook.com/groups/511418892316698/ . There is a lot of room for developing some kind of socially integrated engagement that would make the editors more human, without creating whole new queues (you would have to scale the deployment to the number of people working in that space).

If you ever do something along this line, please never make suggestions or give examples of possible requests to the readers. That resulted in a massive response of inappropriate feedback matching the suggestions in the Article feedback project, and made it almost useless and terribly annoying to the extent that it got shut down.